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2013 Eisner Award Nominations Announced

April 16, 2013 For Immediate Release.

Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards 2013 Nominations Announced

Comic-Con International (Comic-Con) is proud to announce the nominations for the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards 2013. The nominees, chosen by a blue-ribbon panel of judges, reflect the wide range of material being published in comics and graphic novel form today, from crime noire to autobiographical works to cartoon adventures.

Three titles lead the 2013 list with 5 nominations each. Chris Ware’s critically acclaimed Building Stories (published by Pantheon) has nods for Best Graphic Album–New, Best Writer/artist, Best Coloring, Best Lettering, and Best Publication Design. Also garnering 5 nominations are Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Fatale (published by Image) and Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye (published by Marvel). Both are nominated for Best Continuing Series, Best New Series, Best Writer, Best Penciller/Inker, and Best Cover Artist. (Fatale also shares the coloring nomination for Dave Stewart.)

Close behind with 4 nominations are BOOM!/kaboom’s Adventure Time (Best New Series, Best Publication for Kids, Best Publication for Kids, and Best Humor Publication), Monkeybrain’s online comic Bandette by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover (Best New Series, Best Penciller/Inker, Best Coloring, Best Digital Comic), and Carol Tyler’s memoir You’ll Never Know, Book 3: A Soldier’s Heart (Best Graphic Album–New, Best Reality-Based Work, Best Writer/artist, Best Lettering; published by Fantagraphics). Titles with 3 nominations are Charles Burns’s The Hive (Best Graphic Album–New, Best Writer/artist, Best Coloring; published by Pantheon) and Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’s Saga (Best Continuing Series, Best New Series, Best Writer). Thirteen titles have 2 nominations, and the remaining nominations are spread among dozens of books and comics in 29 categories.

Fantagraphics has the most nominations for a publisher, with 24. In addition to the Tyler book, the company has multiple nominees in the writer/artist, archival, international, and design categories. Michael Kupperman’s Tales Designed to Thrizzle has 2 nominations (Best Short Story, Best Single Issue), as does Lilli Carré’s Heads or Tales (Best Single Issue, Best Graphic Album–Reprint). The publisher emerging with the second-most nominations this year with 17 (plus 1 shared) is Image, led by Fatale and Saga, along with 2 nominations each for The Manhattan Projects (Best Continuing Series, Best Writer for Jonathan Hickman), Prophet (Best Continuing Series, Best Writer for Brandon Graham), and Graham’s Multiple Warheads (Best Cover Artist, Best Coloring).

IDW ranks third with 8 nominations (plus 1 shared), including 2 each in the archival categories. Close behind is Pantheon, with 5 nominations for Building Stories and 3 for The Hive. The 5 nods for Hawkeye account for the majority of Marvel’s 7 (plus 1 shared) nominations. Drawn & Quarterly comes in fifth, with 5 nominations, including 2 for Brecht Evens’s The Making of.

Other publishers with multiple nominations include BOOM!, Monkeybrain, and Nobrow (4); Abrams ComicArts, Self Made Hero, Toon Books/Candlewick, Top Shelf, and the University Press of Mississippi (3); DC Comics with 2 nominations and 1 shared; and nine publishers with 2 nominations: Andrews McMeel, Archaia, Disney, First Second, FSG, Koyama, TwoMorrows, and Yen Press. Another 21 publishers have 1 nomination each.

Individual creators with the most nominations are Brandon Graham and Chris Ware with 5; David Aja, Colleen Coover, Sean Phillips, and Carol Tyler with 4; and Ed Brubaker, Charles Burns, Matt Fraction, Brian K. Vaughan, and the Adventure Time team (RyanNorth, Selli Paroline, and Braden Lamb) with 3. Nineteen creators can boast of 2 nominations.

This year’s judges restored three categories that had been dropped by last year’s judges: Best New Series, Best Adaptation from Another Medium, and Best Painter/Multimedia Artist. However, they dropped the Best Limited Series category.

Voting for the awards is held online, and the ballot will be available soon at http://www.eisnervote.com. All professionals in the comic book industry are eligible to vote. The results of the voting will be announced in a gala awards ceremony on the evening of Friday, July 19 at Comic-Con International.

The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards are presented under the auspices of Comic-Con International, a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to creating awareness of and appreciation for comics and related popular artforms, primarily through the presentation of conventions and events that celebrate the historic and ongoing contributions of comics to art and culture. Jackie Estrada has been administrator of the Awards since 1990. She can be reached at jackie@comic-con.org.

The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards Celebrate 25 years!

The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, considered the “Oscars” of comics, turn 25 in 2013. The most prestigious of the industry’s awards, the Eisners are given out at a gala ceremony on the Friday night of Comic-Con International: San Diego.

The Awards encompass more than two-dozen categories covering both works and creators. Nominees are chosen by a blue-ribbon committee of judges, and the winners are chosen by professionals in the comics industry. Started in 1988, the awards are named for Will Eisner, the legendary creator of “The Spirit” and giant of the graphic novel. The Eisner Awards administrator is Jackie Estrada.